When a patient is admitted to a hospital, a variety of tests are performed on the patient to help in diagnosing the patient's illnesses. Some of the tests include collecting specimens, such as blood, skin samples or urine, for example, from the patient and sending them to a laboratory to be tested. Individual or dissected specimen samples are then tested or grown in cultures to form particular organisms. Specific antibiotic therapeutic drugs are chosen to determine how the organism will react to the drug. A list of antibiotics tested for effectiveness against the organisms is determined which will aid the physician in prescribing the most effective antibiotic.
Currently, an attending physician reviews individual microbiological laboratory results from numerous and different charts which may be spread out over many separate pages. The physician has to determine which drugs and therapy regimen to prescribe to a patient by searching for, correlating and analyzing the various information contained within the charts on different pages. The physician has to try to find what organisms of what particular specimens react favorably to what drugs. Once the physician analyzes the information, the patient treatment plan is formulated, ordered and implemented, and the patient is monitored and evaluated on a regular basis with an ongoing charting process. Further tests and revised drug regimens or dosages may be ordered and reported, resulting in additional or modified data entered in the patient's chart. Hence, the patient's chart is continually being revised and updated at various time intervals wherein the physician must again review and analyze all previous and new data on a regular basis. This repetitive charting process may require the input of several clinicians, specialty health care professionals and physicians as well as the primary or attending physician. Even if the charts are entered into a computer, the physician must flip through the various charts electronically and analyze the results in a manner similar as if handwritten charts were used.
In performing the task of analyzing the information on the laboratory charts, the physician has at least three problems in forming the treatment regime. First, the laboratory results are reported at different times. The specimens are collected, and related information is reported first, followed by the reporting after several days or weeks of what organisms were grown, and lastly by what drugs are effective against the organisms reported. Typically, these lab reports contain a listing of specific drugs and their corresponding sensitivities for any specimen collected and organisms grown during a culture. As there may be multiple organisms grown from a single or dissected specimen culture, each organism detected and tested will have its own listing of specific drug sensitivities on a single chart. Therefore, the laboratory results could be spread out over many singular, successive and separate laboratory reports and over many days which takes valuable time for the physician to organize before analysis of the results begin.
Second, there is no guarantee that the laboratory results will reach a patient's bedside chart before the physician analyzes the results. For example, the laboratory may perform the required tests late one day, so that they are not delivered to the patient's bedside chart until after the physicians finished their rounds the next day. This late delivery of the laboratory results may make the physician's analysis inaccurate, because the analysis was based on incomplete and obsolete record information. This hinders the physician in prescribing an effective treatment plan to improve the condition of the patient.
Third, once the laboratory results reach the patient's bedside chart, the physician must still find which chart is the most recent and try to determine whether there is a change of the reaction of the organism to a drug over a period of time. This information is not readily presented on one chart.
Therefore, there exists a significant need for storing, consolidating, and displaying interactions among various drugs, organisms and specimens based on the most current laboratory results, so that a physician can readily prescribe effective treatment to combat the illnesses suffered by a patient.